


Ripchord

by alisonkay



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Character Death, Found Family, Gen, Post Titty Twister, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 04:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1590893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alisonkay/pseuds/alisonkay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'No one else would ever feel the way they felt. No one else would ever know what had happened to them, how it had changed them, what they had lost.</p><p>They were their own breed of broken now.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pull the ripchord

When the sun streams through the broken windows and the last monster heaves it’s dying breath, so does Kate heave her own sigh. Jacob is somewhere nearby, his throat ripped out and a makeshift wooden stake through his heart. He might be dust already, but she hadn’t watched long enough to know, had looked away before the life even left his eyes. Scott is out cold, his head cradled in her lap as she surveys the damage around them, the damage in them.

How could they possibly move on from this? Both of their parents were dead now, they were in a country not their own, vampires apparently existed, and since when was Scott so good with weapons? Kate isn’t sure if she's crying, but she thinks maybe the drops of clear liquid falling onto Scott’s forehead are her tears. Her gaze is so hazy she can’t be sure, though.

One shaky hand moves to smooth away the drops, her palm flattening on his forehead and running into his hairline. Her hand comes away bloodier than it had been before, and her breathing hitches. She hadn’t been able to stop any of it, not even with a chainsaw, not even with the power of her God behind her. 

Something moves to her right and she tenses up, her hand finds the nearest object and wields it above her head, ready to strike out. A chair leg, sharpened on one end and pointed directly at a tired looking Seth. She holds her pose for a moment, then her guard slides down along with her arm. She lets go of the wooden weapon, lets her fingers find their way back to Scott’s warm skin.

The look on Seth’s face speaks volumes. He looks like he understands, like he knows exactly what she is thinking. He looks worn-out, he looks like the world has taken it’s toll on him. He looks sorry, most of all. He looks at her and her brother and he knows it is all his fault, and he is practically oozing his regrets. 

_'So, I did what I had to do. I did what anybody would do. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?'_

She doesn’t think she can muster up the energy to forgive him this time around. She’s not sure he even wants her forgiveness, but right at that very moment, with Scott’s blood trickling down her lap, and her hands on the too-hot skin of his forehead, she can’t even think about it.

"Where’s Richie?" She asks instead, wondering just where the other Gecko had gotten to. Had he decided he was going to join Santanico? Was he a culebra now, too?

"Dead." Seth’s voice is hollow, and Kate thinks maybe she does forgive him, after all.

"Oh," She looks around the ruined bar, catches sunlight in her eyes, looks back down, "Will you help me get Scott out of here?"

A silence hangs in the bloody air. Seth is very still for a moment, then moves all at once, tucking his gun into his pants and moving to tug Scott from her grip. She wants to protest, doesn’t want to let her brother go, but Seth is so much stronger than her, especially now, and he’s hefting Scott like her brother weighs nothing. 

Kate is sitting in a pile of blood—her own, her brother’s, the monster’s they had slain—as she watches a criminal march out the front doors of hell, her brother cradled in his arms like a baby. She pushes herself up slowly, her arms and legs straining against her. She waddles out into the desert sun, hurt and blinded and questioning her faith.

_'So here it goes, sis.'_


	2. The ship has lost it's sail

He tries to leave them, after they find a doctor. It’s not a hospital, not by a long shot, but the tiny man has an operating table in his living room, and Kate feels like that says something about her life now. He takes one look at Scott in Seth’s arms, bloody and unconscious, and he ushers them into his home. When Scott is on the table, and the purported doctor is looking at him, Seth tries to escape.

"He’ll fix your brother up just fine," The last remaining Gecko tries to assure her, his eyes hooded, his voice flat.

"You can’t just leave us here. You can’t." 

"I’m a bastard, Kate, but I’m not a fucking bastard," He tells her, raising his chin and meeting her eyes with his own. She can see the swirling hatred there, the despicable thoughts and feelings rolling through the older man like a storm or a stampede, or a stampede of fucking thunder clouds, it’s really all that dire.

"He’s gone. He’s gone and you’re alone, and we’re alone. I don’t know if Scott will make it," Her voice cracks, she blinks hard and tries to steel herself against the drowning sensation, "But what if he doesn’t? What if you leave, and I lose Scott, and I’m sitting here in the desert alone with nothing? What if you leave us here, and you try to find a place to make your home, and you can never, ever do it because you need people to make a home, and there are no other people in the world who could relate to you now."

She thinks she might be being harsh. She thinks she’s over emotional and distraught and caught up in the moment, but she also knows she’s right. She hadn’t even put those thoughts through her own mind, but as soon as she said them she knew they were true. No one else would ever feel the way they felt. No one else would ever know what had happened to them, how it had changed them, what they had lost.

They were their own breed of broken now.

"Kate—" It’s like a dying whisper, a man in deep water throwing out a lifeline and knowing it won’t catch on anything but craggy rocks and sea foam. His head droops, his eyes close, his hands run over his dirt and blood speckled face.

"You can’t go. Not without us. We can figure it all out, find a place to go, a place to get—get better." 

She imagines a place by the sea, all open windows and fluttering sheer curtains. Something out of a romance novel, but it’s a tragedy in reality, and what exactly would they do in a house like that, a grown man and two teenagers, all with fresh wounds too big to close?

The small man is suddenly by their sides, his hands bloody and his round glasses pushed to the tip of his nose. She hadn’t taken the time to study him before, hadn’t noticed the way his skin crinkled around his eyes, made him look wise. She hadn’t noticed the way the blue of his irises offset his yellow teeth, or the way his hands looked soft and delicate under the blood.

His lips are moving, and there are words coming from him, but she can’t understand, doesn’t get it at all. There’s a firm grip on her shoulder, suddenly, and she turns to look at Seth. His face is even more pained than before, and he’s staring right at her, looking as if he wants for all the world to scoop her into a hug. Did criminals hug their hostages? Was she still a hostage? Was this all a bad dream?

"Kate?" 

"Scott is dead," She blurts suddenly, and things seem to start burning around her. She has nothing. She has _nothing, nothing, nothing_ , no one. 

Kate is alone.


	3. Your ship may be coming in

They’re in the middle of the desert before Kate even realizes they’ve moved. The small man with bloody hands and sad blue eyes had been telling them her brother was dead—gone and out and never coming back, just like Richie—and Seth had been trying to get her to focus, to make sure she wasn’t about to disintegrate into something inhuman, something made purely of sorrow, and then they were here. In the desert.

Kate pushes open the car door, squints blindly as the early noon sun hits her squarely in the face. Seth is in front of the parked car, several feet away. He’s got his suit jacket off, lying on a pile of dirt next to him. The sleeves of his no-longer-white dress shirt are rolled up around his elbows and he is sweating profusely, she can see that even as far away as she is. He’s digging a hole, shovel in hand, and it’s not just a hole because it’s a grave.

She wants to call out to him, to ask him what’s happening or how they got there, or to say _thank you_ or _I’m sorry_ , but instead she moves to the front of the car and leans against the hood. The metal is warm against her jeans and she lets her forearms hit the vehicle, the sun-warmed thing burning her bare skin. It hurts and she should move away, but she is watching a man she barely knows (and yet knows all too well) dig a hole where they will put her brother’s body and she just wants to feel the burning, wants the symmetry between her emotional and physical self. 

Richie never got a grave. Richie got shot, Richie got bit, Richie got staked. Richie turned to dust in a dirty strip club, and Kate feels like maybe he had it worst of all. He was driven so hard by this illusion of a woman, and she turned out to be his doom rather than his salvation. Richie had doomed them all, in the end. 

Seth stops digging, leans back and stretches out his tired muscles. He turns his face to the sun, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, opens them. He sticks the shovel into the ground so it stands up straight, and then he turns and catches sight of Kate for the first time since she climbed out of the car.

"Are you with me?" He calls to her, a little louder than necessary and it feels as though the words echo around Kate.

She considers for a moment, really thinks about it, opens her mouth, and then promptly shuts it again. She nods, instead, mistrustful of her own ability to speak just now.

Seth stands, for a moment, very still. He seems to think about something, weighs his options. Then he is pulling himself out of the hole he has dug, and he is walking back to the car.

He hesitates when he nears Kate, raises a hand as if he wants to touch her in some way—stroke her cheek, or maybe pat her head like a pet. He lowers his hand, instead, keeps on walking until he is behind the car, and then he pops the trunk. The sound makes Kate flinch, and she raises both of her hands to cover her face.

She waits a moment—two. Hears shuffling, movement. She lets her fingers spread slightly and peeks out between them so that she can see the bleary lines of Seth, once again by the hole he has dug, this time with a body clutched in his hands. He crouches, teeters with the weight in his arms, but steadies himself. He lays the body down gently, more gently than she can really stand and then a sob is pulling from her chest.

She is on her knees in seconds, sobbing in the middle of the desert, in front of a stolen car, in front of a criminal and her brother’s limp body and God himself. She is crying so hard, she can’t even breathe and it doesn’t matter because everyone is gone, everyone who ever meant anything to the girl is gone and she is only seventeen, but she’s lost everything. 

Seth doesn’t come to comfort her. It wouldn’t make a difference if he had, and so Kate doesn’t blame him. Instead, he stands up, arms empty now, and takes up the shovel once more. He stabs the pile of loose dirt next to the grave, and scoops the stuff over Scott’s body. Kate can hardly see it through her pain, but Scott’s body is slowly being covered, and she’ll never get to see his face again, and she wants to rip out her own heart, but it won’t do any good.

When Kate has cried and sobbed and felt generally miserable to the point of being numb, she realizes Seth has done his work. The grave is filled, Scott is truly gone, and there is a makeshift cross marking his grave. It is made of two old sticks and some twine, and Kate appreciates the thought there, appreciates that Seth thinks this will give her peace. He is wrong.

She stands slowly, pulling herself up with her arms on the hood of the car, the burning sensation of hot metal not even crossing her mind this time. She manages to get to her feet, can’t see Seth now, hasn’t even thought about where he might be. She moves purposefully, one foot in front of the other until she is standing at the side of Scott’s grave, a shallow hole in the desert filled with more regrets than can be counted.

"I’m sorry, Scott. I’m sorry and I love you. Goodbye." 

She reaches forward and snags the cross marker in her hands, pulls it free of the earth easily. She lofts it in the air, tosses it as far from her and her brother’s grave as she can. God has no place here, not after what happened, not after Kate’s faith was tested so sorely that it broke. She is done believing in higher powers. She is done praying for a happy ending when it is so clearly never going to happen.

"Kate?" 

Seth’s voice makes her flinch, and she hates herself for it. She turns to face him, sees the understanding look in his eyes, and the way his hands are held out to her, as if she is standing on the edge of something and he only wants to pull her back. She thinks she’ll let him, if only this one time.

"I’m sorry, Seth," She gasps, suddenly crying again even when she thought all of her tears had dried up with the desert sun, "I’m sorry about Richie and I’m sorry you’re alone now, too."

"Kate," Seth’s voice is soft as she falls into his arms, sobbing and shaking. He wraps his arms around her tightly, too tightly and it is uncomfortable in a physical sense, but the way it feels as if he is holding her together makes her feel better anyways.

"You’re not alone. You’re not alone. I’ve got you, you’re not alone."

It's like a mantra, and he keeps saying it again and again into her hair, and she wants to believe it so badly that she just clings to him all the tighter, her fingers feeling numb from the pressure, and no doubt leaving marks on his skin.


End file.
